By: Chad Murray
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SAY YOU LIKE IT/SAY YOU DON’T/SAY WHAT YOU REALLY FEEL
One month on from the release of OUTFIT’s Slowness, I’ve decided that it’d be a good idea to write a review of the album for Echoes & Dust.
It’s strange. The first album Performance was smoother than panda slurry with innocent pop melodies and spacey production. Slowness starts off with New Air which personally, I find to be quite refreshing in its use of lo-fi elements and abrasive production because it straddles this line of appealing to the part of me that likes to get masochistic with noise and the part of me that sings perfect impressions of The Supremes in the bath. In the same fashion OUTFIT bleed seamlessly into the title track which again utilises a really pretty layering of ugly things and nice things to create some sort of sonic Marilyn Diptych. The cherry on the cake is the refrain at the end where Hunt simply croons “slowness” again and again, it makes for an enjoyable listen.
Smart Thing to me is where the album begins to get really interesting. The vocal melody is amazing and catchy, a real learner about a yearner. It has these great proggy industrial guitars that sit on top of the minimalistic arrangement and the beautifully prosaic samples really well. It should be noted that none of these songs seem to scoop you up in the same way that the songs on Performance did. That’s not to say “these songs are fucking jarg”. It’s just that they improve with every listen. I hear a new texture and a new instrument each time I listen to them.
I read something recently about the band all moving away from Liverpool to different places and working apart on this new album and I think the song to me that reflects that most is ‘Boy’. The singer mentioned that he’d moved to New York or some other big slice of Americana and Boy has an instrumentation that reminds me of that with its little nods to Jazz music and classical film scores heard in little percussive piano rhythms and what can only be described as some fucking sick saxomaphoning. Happy Birthday to me starts too much on the other side of things, it’s pretty dissonant and I don’t really get it. There I said it. The vocal melody is amazing again but, the music is like Running Up That Hill playing on a mobile phone speaker in a tumble dryer. There are a few great distorted resonating sounds that essentially sound like they’ve took the piano out of the tumble dryer and blasted the background sounds against a fan. Then it all goes off big time and the percussive synths and drums and the fat layers kick in like an overwhelming fever. Note: THIS IS NOT MUSIC FOR A HANGOVER. This is an album to sit and think about. It’s an album to digest and regurgitate and then nibble at again like an exotic food that looks like it should kill you. Wind Or Vertigo is so good. It’s like OUTFIT at their most Vangelis, I’ll probably kill them saying that…if they were to care what a creep in a dungeon thinks. I could listen to Wind Or Vertigo on a constant loop, the pads and wind instruments are where it’s at. Then Genderless kicks in and if you’re listening closely, you’ll shit your pants.
It has these big Hans Zimmery Batman drums that cut through the mood of Wind Or Vertigo like a knife. There’s all backward vocals and keyboard cat percussive rhythms on some sort of squidgy soft play keys. What’s mental about Genderless is that by the end it’s like some sort of fucked up post-rock Nine Inch Nails which seems so incongruous with any expectations I have for OUTFIT and yet, when the next song Framed comes in, it’s kind of like “oh, they’re doing that again, that’s cool.” Familiar OUTFIT. Framed is like my jeans, t-shirt, hoodie/jacket combination which I stole from Johnny Galecki and Dogma; classic OUTFIT but, nothing special when looking at the rest of the wardrobe. I have lots of these band/clothes puns written down for this review by the way so, buckle up. The chorus is really great but, listening to the album as a whole the song kind of seems like a remnant from the past rather than a step in a whole new direction like everything else. Although, it could just as easily be seen as a blending of the old and the new. On the Water on The Way is nice it has a sort of Remurdered-esque bassy drive with some nice pitch shifting against some fairly minimal instrumentation to form the backbone of the song. Meanwhile, lyrics like “don’t be so serious” and “say you like it, say you don’t and say what you really feel“ build into a swarming instrumental section that cuts through the bullshit like whacking in your headphones when walking down the street to avoid having to hear some cunt’s bullshit. And that computery outro is pretty sweet too. Cold Light Home’s intro is something to behold, it shows OUTFIT’s secret weapon from Performance (SAMPLING) at its best. However, it then goes into something that can only be labeled “alternative clubland”. Do you like alternative music? whatever the fuck that is…do you like clubs and the land there in? I’m not a fan. The song might be for you, the breakdown is probably not gonna be delectable to a pop music fan though. Not really a drop either, not that anyone’d want that. The redeeming feature is the noisy bits which are plentiful and palatable to the ears.
Last song_
To me the last song is like something David Firth would make. Spoilsbury Toast Boy’s Psychedelic Pop Music Adventure… it could be called. There’s all computer bits and abrasive noisy bits and bits that sound like they’re played on gramophones on alien spaceships but, the best bit is the instrumental mid-section which is a kind of Final Fantasy underwater boss fight extravaganza of beautiful seashell synth sounds. The consistent piano contrast against the vocals that permeates throughout the album is also incredibly enticing at the start of this song, it’s just strange how it transmogrifies into such a bizarre form as the song progresses. Swam Out is my foremost recommendation from this album.
I’ve followed OUTFIT since they only had a few songs on Soundcloud (Two Islands, Every Night I Dress Up As You and Vehicles which are all instant classics) and it’s crazy how the band have expanded from there.
The songs seem to retain hints to their early material yet, go in new unforeseeable directions cementing a defining character for the band and teasing a bright future. Allow Slowness to gestate around your brain and you’ll get a near-on flawless album after a number of listens.
